Filip Norrgård’s blog @ filips.net
Filip’s blog about mobile technology, tech itself and other stuff

Windows Calendar and Google Calendar Are Working Fine With iCalendar(s)
23 January 2007 in Code-ing & Root | Comments (0)

With Windows Vista, you will now get a — quite nice — calendar program called Windows Calendar. It looks a lot like Apples iCal.app and probably has gotten a nice amount of inspiration from Apple once again, but that is beside the point. I tested my iCalendar and vCalendar generator that I use in Dingo, and found a bug in Windows Calendar. It seems that Windows Calendar doesn’t parse the characters correctly, and in the attached screenshot you can see that there are boxy looking characters where the character “ä” should be.

Not only that, Windows Calendar only supports iCalendar, no vCalendar. I suppose that it is a good thing going from vCalendar version 1.0 to 2.0 (aka. iCalendar).

I also tried out Google Calendar’s iCalendar support and it seems like they’ve finally fixed a bug in their iCalendar parser. I could upload a single iCalendar file with all my course “appointments” to Google Calendar and it inserted every single one, no buts about it. The Google Calendar team are worthy of an applaude for fixing it in a year (which is the time since I last tried it).

SMS Spam Is The Worst Spam
16 January 2007 in Root | Comments (1)

There is nothing more irritating that seeing this arrive in your textmessage inbox:

And opening the message you see this (notice that “soittoaani” should be spelled “soittoääni”:

What it is, is not an offer of gratitude from your mobile phone operator, but plain and simple spam to get you hooked on ordering their services. But, the fun part is that the user agreement (or TOS, EULA, I don’t know the exact word to use here) tells you that you are signing up to their service and paying 2€ for the luxury of free tones per month, or at least so according to F-Secure’s weblog.

Where is the sender from? No-one seems to know for sure, but the domain vkap.net is registered in Germany, so probably from there. (Jamba, aka. Jamster is also from the same country, but there is no evident connection between vkap and them)

What can you do to stop the spam? Whatever you do, do NOT connect to the site or type it in your browser! Contact your operator immidiately when you get this piece of sh… uhum, spam and tell them what you generally think of spam. (Don’t be too harsh, or “direct”, with the helpdesk personel, though; they are humans too.) Hopefully we can all erase this before it grows too big.

January, The Start Of Hurricane Season In Sweden (?)
16 January 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

Sweden seems to have gotten their own hurricane season that seems to last for the month of January every second year.

In 2005 southern Sweden was hit with a amazingly powerful low pressure which generated hurricane force winds. Called “Gudrun” it oblitirated woods and power-lines leaving many without power, accessible roads and telephones.

Fast forward to today (or last weekend to be exact) and yet another storm — called “Per” — with hurricane force winds hits the same southern Sweden. This wasn’t as powerful storm as Gudrun, and most people are having a sense of déjà vu (not like in the movie with the same name, though). Power, phones, roads are down, but this time it seems to be easier to get things up and a-running than when the last hurricane came for a visit.

There’s one thing that’s interesting here and that is the way the Swedes are coordinating the rebuilding as soon as the storm has moved on where as the US government hasn’t done much for the New Orleans post-Katrina, even today. Sure, it isn’t the same case here (country size, GNP differences and such) but it is the thought-to-action-time that counts the points in my book.

I’m only hoping the swedish power companies would try to coordinate some power line buryings to prevent the trees from cutting off power when it blows a little. That would minimize the damage a little the next time they’re having a hurricane season.

Site Update: New Style
8 January 2007 in Root | Comments (0)

The site changes have started. Metamorphosis stage 1 complete.

Changes Coming Soon…
13 November 2006 in Root | Comments (0)

There are some site-wide changes coming soon together with a possible release of the public beta of Dingo.

Please hold, our operators are currently busy.

New Dingo Coming Up…
31 August 2006 in Root | Comments (0)

I’m currently working non-stop (ok, maybe not — but really hard nontheless) on Dingo² and currently all is looking good:

You can probably see that this is still pre-beta and that I’ve messed up the icon for the status bar — the icon is 32 x 32 when it should be 16 x 16 (where did Microsoft put that property again?) — and some other things in the code that you luckily can’t see from this screenshot.

The things needing some fine adjustments are practically all features. The syncing is starting to work surprisingly fine and I’m looking forward to completing the synchronizer code for all the external calendars (iCalendar, vCalendar, Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar).

And yes, finally you will be able to get more than one timetable into Dingo, plus also choose which seasonal timetables to sync with! (Even I have been waiting for that! )

Current first beta ETA: Next week.

Over and out.

Google Maps Goes Europe!
27 April 2006 in Fun & Root | Comments (0)

Google Maps was apperently updated just around two days ago with maps of Europe, which is absolutely fantastic!

Interestingly, the maps and photos of Vaasa / Vasa / Wasa was also updated with newer satellite photos, maybe in honour of the city’s 400 anniversary which is this year?
Anyways, the photos aren’t all that old, but still somewhat old, since the expansion of the “market square cave” aka. the parking space beneath the city center’s market square is quite viewable. If you look closely, you can see that they are at the completion stage and filling parts of the new underground parking space with sand for the market square pavement stones.

I think this picture dates back to two years to 2004, so that’s resonably new pictures Google got a hold of.

The interesting part here is that streets in Vaasa are bilingual, that is, named in both Finnish and Swedish. But, Google only identifies the streets on their Finnish name for the moment. If you zoom out, you’ll discover another interesting tidbit, all the islands in the Vaasa coastal area are in Swedish. (Ok, some of them have their bilingual names there, but the Swedish name is generally looking in the larger font size for some strange reason.) Interesting…

Missing In Action: Myself
13 February 2006 in Root | Comments (0)

Sure, I’ve not much posting here lately, but the excuse is the same: not enough time to post stuff. I have been reading, coding, battling the flu, resetting my Pocket PC after ActiveStink ActiveSync hell, licensing wrestling, getting a job (or two), and… that seems to be the whole list…

Interesting thing I noticed when I made the software section available was that the fastest (although not proven with scientific tests) search engine bot on the planet seems to be the MSN search bot. It noticed my PCWN Buddy existed way, way before Google seemed to find it. Both time, I used the “international” (i.e. not localized version) of the search engines and it seemed like the MSN search engine was the fastest to catch up on things, although we shant forget that Google has an unbelivable big distributed data system where information takes time to propagate to all nodes. The only problem now is that both search engines point to the wrong page (the software page) instead of the correct page of the PCWN Buddy (i.e. /software/pcwn-buddy/).

I was about to ban the MSN bot once back last year when it became increasinly bandwidth hungry, but the banning actions of other webmasters seemed to get the attention of the MSN gang whereby the bandwidth consumption seemed to drop. Seemed like a good thing that I didn’t ban MSN from my website. (It is my biggest visitor according to the server logs! )

Also, be sure to check out my other program (that I’ve been blogging about): Dingo. It is one sweet piece of software, especially if you are studying at University of Vaasa.

Who the Hell Is Trying to Poison the Well?
8 December 2005 in Root | Comments (0)

Ohh, yes, after a while, they’re back: the spammers. Random IP addresses with legit links but no legit text. And they are trying to poison my spam filter, as they’ve done before:

I really appreciate what you’re doing here. Very interesting site. Profound, Black, Superb nothing comparative to Good: http://www.imdb.com/search , Rape Circle is very good Cosmos Do Double Create - that is all that Mistery is capable of , to Con Chair you should be very Big when Stake is Chips it will Double Pair

Gotta love it. The best part is the random compliment which ranges from the above to “very nice. i hope you’ll update very soon.” , “Very interesting. keep the good work!“, “I enjoyed your site so much so i have to say it to you.“. <sarcasm> Yeah, right, like I believe them — my site stinks! </sarcasm>

Well, to look on the bright side, I now joined the Anti-Spam Jedi Council, which more commonly is known as Akismet (mmmm… Kismet *runs to the store to buy some*). It is a unified spam filter that analyzes the input from lots of other Wordpress installations (with the plug-in installed) and filters the incoming spam based on some custom-made algorithms and agents. (Did you get that? ) In other words, if someone else has gotten spammed by a user at IP address 192.168.1.1, then Akismet will (probably) already be blacklisting that spammer when he/she tries to spam you. Although, that attempt will probably be foiled as Akismet is installed on your Wordpress installation and it sees that the IP address is a blacklisted one from the Akismet servers.

So, thanks once again spammers for making your own life harder than ever!

(And, yeah, while I remember it. WTF does this mean: “grass can compute circle” ? )

Why Nordic Characters Appear to Work Only in Some Web Browsers
1 December 2005 in Root | Comments (0)

I’m now going to answer the question that I’ve been asking:

The reason why Opera and Internet Explorer do not seem to work properly with Nordic characters is that they have, by default, enabled the feature UTF-8 URL encoding. By turning this option off, you will be able to view the page åäö.html.

To turn UTF-8 URL encoding off in Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Advanced and uncheck:

“Always send URLs as UTF-8 (requires restart)”

To turn off UTF-8 encoding in Opera, go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Network and uncheck:

“Encode international addresses with UTF-8″

There, now after restarting IE, or just clicking OK in Opera’s options window, you should be able to view åäö.html. In Opera, you must manually enter the URL to that file: http://www.filips.net/åäö.html and then press [Enter] (since this page is UTF-8 encoded, Opera will send the URL encoded in the same encoding that this page is in).

Well, now most webmasters and webdevelopers are probably asking: do we have to ask our visitors to turn off UTF-8 URL encoding in their browsers manually? The answer is no, you shouldn’t have to. It should be possible to configure your webserver to accept UTF-8 URL requests, but it might be hard to get it working. If you are on Apache running on some open source operating system, then you might be interested in hearing that mod_fileiri can allow both UTF-8 as well as ISO-8859-1 encoded URLs when configured the correct way. But that is probably no use to you if you are with a web hotel.

However, note that you will have to test your web applications together with UTF-8 enabled to see if there are any cross site scipting vunerabilities in them. The UTF-8 characters are a much bigger bunch than the old ASCII space ever was, not to mention the ISO-8859-1 encoding space.

If there is a simpler way of getting UTF-8 encoded URLs to work on my server, please let me know. Until otherwise, I’ll let my server be alone for the moment: “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”